Colourful vegetables

Does it fade, this mild but genuine shock and amazement, when you've grown vegetables for many years?

 

Do you cease to look wondrously at the beautiful things that appear amongst the plants you put in the ground, that you can just take, like a child who doesn't understand how the world works?



I intend to find out.

Bonkers.

Purple Pepper

I have been looking forward to this moment since February, when I sowed many many seeds into trays of compost and tended to them on all the windowsills all over the house. Amongst other things, I was attempting to grow multi-coloured peppers, some of which promised to be purple! Who knew you could do that?!

 

And today, in that strange way large, seemingly conspicuous vegetables often somehow tend to do, e.g. sudden marrows, my first purple pepper just appeared from nowhere!

 

 

Except...it's black?

Are they meant to be black?!

Now it's gone er...whatever colour it is, I don't know how to tell when it's ripe. Is that it? Should I let it get bigger? I shall find out.

Runner Bean Salad

I picked my first little bunch of beans today!

 

And I knew just the sort of thing I wanted to do with them....and it turned out really tasty, so here's the recipe.

Ingredients (serves two):

Pesto ingredients:
handful of fresh basil
half a handful of pine nuts
half a clove of garlic
teensy bit of fresh chilli
olive oil
sea salt
wholegrain mustard (optional)

Main stuff:
some runner beans
some uber-tasty little tomatoes
leaves if you want them: lettuce, rocket, etc
half a handful of pine nuts

 
First, make the pesto: I used a pestle and mortar because it was far too small a quantity to put in the blender.
1. chop up the basil leaves finely
2. chop up the garlic and the little bit of chilli finely
3. mash up the pine nuts with a bit of olive oil...

 
4. Mash the whole lot together with some sea salt...

 
5. Chop the beans up a bit and blanch them in boiling water for 4 minutes - you want them to still have a crunch.

6. Strain and let cool for 5 - 10 minutes. Meanwhile dry fry the pine nuts to very very lightly toast them.

7. Mix some or all of the pesto into the beans, and mix the halved tomatoes in too.

8. Leaves, beans and tomatoes, pine nuts. Easy.

It is exciting, growing vegetables.

  Yellow courgettes

 

 

  Tomatoes - they taste INSANELY good, had my first one yesterday

 

  Spaghetti squash, just starting to make off in every creeper direction

My Favourite Salad

My lettuces were ready for eating (i.e. about to get out of control, we're not talking baby leaf) today, so it was definitely salad for dinner. This is my favourite salad, which I'll be honest, takes a long time if you make a decent amount of it because of all the sweating and roasting of vegetables, but you could whip it up in 40 minutes if you made a small, unsweated batch.

 

 



 

Ingredients:

 

1 aubergine

2 red peppers

1 courgette

some sort of earnest lentil

feta cheese

fresh mint

red onion

fresh salad leaves

tomatoes (if you like)

 

1. Sweat the aubergine and courgette by chopping them into chunks, sticking them in a colander and pouring tons of salt on them, and leaving them in the sink for 30 minutes.

 

 

2. Meanwhile, roast the red pepper chunks in a bit of olive oil at 200C if you're limited with oven space. Should take about 30 minutes.

 

3. Rinse the salt off the other veggies, and pat and squeeze them dry with embarrassing amounts of paper towel. Roast them for 30 minutes as above.

 

4. Meanwhile, cook your lentils. I use green speckly ones and they usually take about 35 minutes. Apparently you shouldn't boil them like hell, just simmer.

 

5. Leave the lentils to cool or even run some cold water through them if you're eating soon.

 

6. Chop up some feta, some red onion and some mint and bung everything together.

 

7. Eat with lots of fresh leaves. I chopped up some tomatoes and spread a bit of my homemade (with hazelnuts this time!) pesto on them as they were a bit boring.

I usually put the lentilly salad on the bed of leaves but my bowl overflowed...

Elderflower Champagne

It's that lovely time of year again, the elder trees are all suddenly going for it, blooming away. I am taking advantage of this. Off I went to collect the elderflowers in my new basket. The recipe says 25 heads of elderflower, which sounds like loads, but it only takes about 5 minutes to collect.

Recipe for 10 litres:

·       6.7 litres hot water

·       1.170kg sugar

·       Juice and zest of 7 lemons (I just peeled the rind off them, we'll see if it works)

·       3 tbsp white wine vinegar

·       25 heads of elderflower

1. Put the hot water and sugar into a large container (a spotlessly clean bucket is good) and stir until the sugar dissolves, then top up with cold water so you have 6 litres of liquid in total.

2. Add the lemon juice and zest, the vinegar and the flower heads and stir gently.

 

3. Cover with clean muslin and leave to ferment in a cool, airy place for a couple of days. Take a look at the brew at this point, and if it’s not becoming a little foamy and obviously beginning to ferment, add a pinch of yeast.

4. Leave the mixture to ferment, again covered with muslin, for a further four days. Strain the liquid through a sieve lined with muslin and decant into sterilised strong glass bottles with champagne stoppers (available from home-brewing suppliers) or Grolsch-style stoppers, or sterilized screw-top plastic bottles (a good deal of pressure can build up inside as the fermenting brew produces carbon dioxide, so strong bottles and seals are essential).

5. Seal and leave to ferment in the bottles for at least a week before serving, chilled. The champagne should keep in the bottles for several months. Store in a cool, dry place

Nettle and Dandelion Beer

My brother is turning into a keen brewer, despite being too skint for much equipment, or indeed, ingredients. Therefore he was very excited to read about nettle and dandelion beer, something you can make from free and extremely abundant ingredients. Infuriatingly abundant for most gardeners.

The recipe says get a bin bag of nettles, a box of dandelion flowers (which is nice and easy as you don't have to dig up the roots and spend ages washing them), boil them for half an hour, strain off the liquor, add three and a bit kilos of sugar, cool it, add the yeast, done. Oh and some citric acid and yeast nutrient. Sounds easy as pie. So we picked a bag of nettles:

And a box of dandelions:

And then realised that we didn't have anything big enough to boil it all up in. People into brewing have big stainless steel pots and gas burner things to do it in, but we didn't so Pete spent all day boiling little batches in as many pots as we could find!

He does however have a big bucket to brew in, so eventually it all made its way in there and has now finished fermenting.

It didn't ferment for as long as we were expecting so the yeast might have died early. It might have gone horribly wrong! I'm not going to be the first one to taste it, that's for sure, it looks disgusting.

Its golden companion you can see there behind it is the mead! It's basically fermented honey solution. Isn't it beeyoitiful? It's been bubbling merrily for weeks now and shows no sign of settling down. I can't wait to taste that, but apparently I have to wait for a year, and then there's only that much of it! Honey is expensive.

Soon we shall bottle the nettle and dandelion beer....

Bellingen Community Garden

Taylor told me about Bellingen's community garden on Snake Day so I went to check it out.

It really did feel like a properly lovely community space, apart from the fact it was totally deserted. Clearly, though, that is not normally the case, and I'm going to try and find a way into the gardening posse. I must be prepared to be inventive and patient, as a part of me suspects that these people were actually there all the time, that day, but were just hiding underground in their hippie burrows. Or maybe they only come and garden at night, by the light of the moon. In any case, I will do some investigating and report back.

Chilli Sauce

Minyon Falls

Warning: If you don't find trees even faintly interesting this will be incredibly boring for you.

Yesterday we decided we weren't going surfing. That left options of staying at home or doing nothing, or....well that was all we had. We asked around as there are lots of boys staying here at the moment, and Caleb said that Minyon falls was good for a trip. So off we went.

We spotted climbing routes! Only problems being getting to the start of the routes, topping out into thick Australian bush full of nasty wildlife, and the fact that we have no rope. Not to mention my ability to climb. But....

After going to see the falls close up we decided to embark on a Walk down to the bottom of it. I was scared but we had lots of food to fuel me and the promise of as many rests as I wanted, so off we went.

A helpful sign told us to look out for the progression in the plantage from wet sclerophyll forest to sub tropical rainforest, so this was duly noted. And to start with, a squiggly tree!

Cool roots

As we descended down deeper into the forest, it got generally darker but bright sublight charged through in bits, making the photos look all enchanted forestesque.

Snazzy lichen

Crazy rooties of the Bangalow Palm

There are a couple of cheeky fern things that have set up shop in the upper branches of this big tree, using its height to get lots of light.

It felt like a long walk and I had a couple of rests, but finally we found the river coming away from the falls.

We found a pool and decided to stop there and have lunch and a swim. The waterfall was just a few hundred metres further over some boulders but I was knackered and wasn't too fussed!

Zappa spotted a big eel! I was very excited. For someone that isn't that bothered about wildlife he's very good at spotting it. You can kind of just about see it in this photo. It got annoyed with me being seemingly inedible (or maybe it didn't like having its picture taken) and it properly splashed me with its tail and got me all wet.

I felt much better after the rest and food and we started talking about stuff we'd like to do, kind of like New Year's resolutions but a bit late. We talked about going camping and making things and going hang-gliding and stuff and I got so excited, and we talked about it on the walk back up, and other stuff, I was chatting away and I was so happy and distracted I didn't have time to get worried about if I could make it or if it was too much for me, and I didn't have a single rest and I was fine! It was a 2km proper uphill walk! SCORE. It is so insane how much our minds affect us.

Before we go, guess what this rather beautiful thing is?

Someone's windscreen!